A Cyber-Physical Social System (CPSS) tightly integrates computer systems with the physical world and human activities. In this article, a three-level CPSS for early fire detection is presented to assist public authorities to promptly identify and act on emergency situations. At the bottom level, the system’s architecture involves IoT nodes enabled with sensing and forest monitoring capabilities. Additionally, in this level, the crowd sensing paradigm is exploited to aggregate environmental information collected by end user devices present in the area of interest. Since the IoT nodes suffer from limited computational energy resources, an Edge Computing Infrastructure, at the middle level, facilitates the offloaded data processing regarding possible fire incidents. At the top level, a decision-making service deployed on Cloud nodes integrates data from various sources, including users’ information on social media, and evaluates the situation criticality. In our work, a dynamic resource scaling mechanism for the Edge Computing Infrastructure is designed to address the demanding Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of this IoT-enabled time and mission critical application. The experimental results indicate that the vertical and horizontal scaling on the Edge Computing layer is beneficial for both the performance and the energy consumption of the IoT nodes.

Mobile applications are progressively becoming more sophisticated and complex, increasing their computational requirements. Traditional offloading approaches that use exclusively the Cloud infrastructure are now deemed unsuitable due to the inherent associated delay. Edge Computing can address most of the Cloud limitations at the cost of limited available resources. This bottleneck necessitates an efficient allocation of offloaded tasks from the mobile devices to the Edge. In this paper, we consider a task offloading setting with applications of different characteristics and requirements, and propose an optimal resource allocation framework leveraging the amalgamation of the edge resources. To balance the trade-off between retaining low total energy consumption, respecting end-to-end delay requirements and load balancing at the Edge, we additionally introduce a Markov Random Field based mechanism for the distribution of the excess workload. The proposed approach investigates a realistic scenario, including different categories of mobile applications, edge devices with different computational capabilities, and dynamic wireless conditions modeled by the dynamic behavior and mobility of the users. The framework is complemented with a prediction mechanism that facilitates the orchestration of the physical resources. The efficiency of the proposed scheme is evaluated via modeling and simulation and is shown to outperform a well-known task offloading solution, as well as a more recent one.

The evolution of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and edge computing enables resource-constrained mobile robots to offload the computationally intensive localization algorithms. Naturally, utilizing the remote resources of an edge server to offload these tasks encounters the challenge of a joint co-design in communication, control, estimation, and computing infrastructure. We introduce a set-based estimation offloading framework, for the specific case of the navigation of a unicycle robot toward a target position. The robot is subject to modeling and measurement uncertainties, and the estimation set is calculated using overapproximation techniques that alleviate additional computations. A switching set-based control mechanism provides accurate navigation and triggers more precise estimation algorithms when needed. To guarantee the convergence of the system and optimize the utilization of remote resources, a utility-based offloading mechanism is designed, which takes into account both the dynamic network conditions and the available computing resources at the network edge. The performance of the proposed framework is demonstrated through simulations and comparison with alternative offloading schemes.

The rapid evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT) and edge computing is driving a shift towards distributed computing continuum systems. These systems integrate virtualization technologies to optimize resource allocation across edge and cloud environments. Orchestrating resources within this continuum presents challenges, such as seamless IoT integration, distributed deployments, and efficient resource provisioning. To address these challenges, we propose a Meta-Orchestration framework, aiming to provide a resilient and adaptive orchestration solution, ensuring that the various orchestration components operate seamlessly and efficiently, by adopting a system of systems approach. This paper details the framework's architecture, outlines a deployment workflow, and evaluates its performance in a small-scale testbed. Results demonstrate its efficacy in facilitating efficient multi-cluster deployment and re-optimization of distributed applications under dynamic workloads.